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Richard Reed Parry of Grammy-winning rock band Arcade Fire is releasing his first solo album with ANTI- Records today, Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1.

The Fader has described the record as “a lush and verdant composition filled with buzzing cicadas, plucky guitar, and his airy voice flowing like a breeze through the treetops. Folksy and alive, the single fits squarely in line with Vol. 1's inspiration: the forests in Japan.” Watch Parry perform the track “I Was In The World (Was The World In Me) in a Scottish forest HERE.

Japanese folk myths, death poems and British folk music were all significant influences on this record. Long before he joined Montreal’s Arcade Fire in 2003, Parry grew up in a thriving folk music community in Toronto, where house parties were full of singing, weekly gatherings featured dances of the British Isles and all the progeny were routinely corralled into singing on popular children’s albums.

The genesis of the songs that eventually became Vol. 1 manifested themselves after Arcade Fire’s first tour of Japan in February 2008. Parry stayed on for weeks after the last show, heading to a monastery for some solace in “the biggest silence you’ve ever heard.” One day he was walking alone in a massive, snow-covered cedar forest when he heard distant voices, voices that sounded a lot like his father’s folk group back in Toronto, Friends of Fiddlers Green. “There was no reason for something to sound like full-throated, British-Isle folk singing there,” he recalls. “I walked and walked but I could never get closer to where the music was coming from.”

Three touchstones while recording were the work of avant-garde cellist and songwriter Arthur Russell, the Orb’s Live ’93 album, and Tom Waits’s Bone Machine—the latter mixed by Tchad Blake, who welcomed Parry’s invitation to mix parts of this record. Parry wanted to create a tangible aural garden of rapturous colours that invite exploration, an immersive experience. “I feel not like taking [this music] to loud places, but to quiet places,” Parry clarified. “I’m very curious about who this music is going to find.”